The benefits of massage on the human body are well known and it is also known that, in order to enjoy such benefits without having to resort to an expert masseur, it has recently become a diffused practice to undergo a hydromassage, this being a massage performed with liquid streams.
Nevertheless, up to a short time ago, hydromassages had been practiced with very scarce rationality in most of their applications; in fact, if performed in a liquid environment, the hydromassage reduced itself to lapping the body (or parts thereof) with scarcely efficacious liquid streams, distributed in a totally disorderly and uneven manner; whereas, if performed in an airy environment, it merely hit a limited part of the body with more or less violent, possibly intermittent, liquid jets. A rational distribution of the massaging action had in fact not been studied, nor had it been thought to direct said action according to the normal standards of massage. For a hydromassage to be efficacious, it should instead be complete and continuous, starting from the feet and moving up towards the head along the whole body, without any interruptions and with possibility to regulate the intensity and frequency of the liquid jets allowing to perform the hydromassage.
Solutions have recently been supplied, taking at least partly into account these fundamental requirements in facing the problems of hydromassage. Such solutions provide for apparatuses wherein means, rotating about an axis substantially coinciding with that of the body to be massaged, eject at least one water spout distributed according to a cylindrical helix having the same axis.
In practice, this type of apparatus has so far been obtained by means of very complicated structural systems, delicate in operation and/or limited in use only to parts of the human body.
In particular, the apparatus of the DE-A-2341604 provides for a structure holding a human body lying down, which comprises at least one rotating ring, moving longitudinally to the body, which ejects water spouts towards the inside of said structure. The complexity of the whole structure and the difficulties of a correct and reliable working of this apparatus appear quite evident, said apparatus being furthermore unsuited (unless resorting to even further structural complications) to perform a continuous and uninterrupted massage only in one direction, as it is indispensable for the body to obtain beneficial results.
The FR-A-2536656 describes in turn an apparatus of simpler mechanical characteristics and performing a more rational hydromassage, but which is however designed to operate over limited parts of the human body and which could not be used, such as it is conceived, for massaging the whole body of a person. In fact, this apparatus provides for a horizontal cage to hold one part of the body (for instance a leg), and the helical water spout hitting said part is ejected from a plurality of nozzles, obtained in a helically shaped tube rotating about its own axis, which coincides with the axis of the cage. The construction and steadiness in operation of the helical tube of this apparatus involve quite a lot of problems, deriving from the structure and mounting of the helical tube, which consists of a rotating member formed of strongly cantilevered portions. These problems become insurmountable as the tube grows in size, especially in length. It can thus be understood how the apparatus of the FR-A-2536656 cannot be used to perform a hydromassage on parts of the body extending beyond those shown in the drawings of this Patent and, even less, on the whole body of a person.
The aforementioned limitations of these apparatuses--which no doubt appear evident to an expert in the field--are probably the cause for the lack of diffusion thereof (they do not appear to be available on the market, nor to have been installed with some success in the past), but it should also objectively be said that such apparatuses have a specific destination, and that they can evidently be used only in nursing homes or hospitals, while being totally unsuited for installation in normal dwellings. This is instead becoming nowadays, an increasingly felt requirement: the fact of disposing in one's home of a simple and reliable apparatus, which takes up little room and allows, by merely replacing the normal shower, to perform in an easy and practical manner--and at a reasonable cost, both for what concerns installation and service--frequent hydromassages, tends to become a normal aspiration of people of a certain kind, when it is not actually imposed or recommended for health purposes.
It is anyhow certain that, in order to be able to adequately satisfy this requirement, it should be possible to easily install an apparatus for hydromassages in the bathroom of an apartment or of a hotel, in the manner of a shower, and it is indispensable for the apparatus to have most simple structural and functional characteristics, to be easily used and reliable, as well as being of reasonable cost. These characteristics--which cannot certainly be found, as seen, in the apparatuses of the previously cited patents--are instead all present in the apparatus object of the present invention which, after the hydromassage, is apt to perform also the sauna, thus completing in the most satisfactory manner a modern and efficacious health treatment of the body, which is certainly appreciated by a vast class of users.